Wingspan vs. Stripe: How to Build a Better Payments Process

Payroll systems operate on predictable timetables. W2 employees can expect a regular paycheck that hits their bank balance at the same time every month.

But what about 1099 employees?

Contractors don’t necessarily work at the same time each month. Some may be expecting Net 15 payouts and others Net 30. Administrators need to keep track of these timelines and make sure they’re handling all the other elements of contractor management, too—verifiying license and insurance, submitting paperwork for tax compliance, and fielding contractor inquiries.

The gig economy—1099 work across industries like consulting, digital-to-consumer apps like TaskRabbit, or food delivery —is only getting larger. At least 41 million people in the United States did some form of gig work in 2024, or between 25-36% of workers, depending on who you ask. As more workers choose flexible working arrangements, more of your payroll and HR customers are going to want solutions to handle this influx of workers.

You don’t need to build a new system from scratch. Wingspan Embedded Finance allows you to take the best of what Wingspan has to offer and make it your own. Here’s how it works:

Designed with the contractor management lifecycle in mind

Wingspan’s integrated payments engine automatically creates invoices from work orders, calculates accurate payment amounts and runs payroll for contractors as often as needed through ACH, debit, or instant transfer. 

You can choose to move payments through a variety of systems. Tons of different platforms exist to do this, including popular payments processing tools like Stripe.

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But a platform like Stripe is designed for ecommerce and consumer payments, not back-end payroll. You wouldn’t pay a contractor with a credit card in the same way you wouldn’t send an invoice to a retailer. 

Hospitality company Pourtastic Tastings runs their business on a network of brand ambassadors that manage promotional tasting events for breweries, wineries, and beverage manufacturers. They tried to use Stripe to pay their team of 750 contractors, but it wasn’t easy. “Stripe worked, but it was super convoluted,” said Keith Diamond, co-owner and managing partner. “The monetary flows were needlessly complicated, it didn’t provide visibility to our contractors on payment status and their support was a nightmare.” 

With Wingspan Embedded Finance, you can:

• Drive more revenue. Enable a new revenue stream in weeks instead of months with an API-first platform that delivers a best-in-class service. 
• Get it done faster. Minimize impact on internal teams by eliminating the cost burden to build, maintain, or support users of the platform by partnering with us.
• Control the user experience. Embed Wingspan seamlessly into your existing software ecosystem with flexible, white-labeled UI components and customizable front-end.

Wingspan is designed with the contractor lifecycle in mind. If you want to enable your customers to pay contractors, payments is just one aspect of solving their pain points. You’ll also need functionality that supports onboarding, 1099 tax compliance, and offering contractor benefits like health insurance. 

“Wingspan helps us manage payment reliability, back office support and compliance so we can focus on growing the business,” said Diamond. “Wingspan is the perfect partner to help us scale our business.”

A custom-built payments partnership

Partners can take one of two different approaches:

1. Full platform access. Take our entire platform and embed it directly into your product.
2. Contractor-only access. Embed specific Wingspan functionality into your product. Pick and choose which features make the most sense for you. It’s your front-end infrastructure and user experience, but with Wingspan underneath.

With both options, you can choose how much you want it to look and feel like your brand. You can fully whitelabel the experience—where it’s powered by Wingspan behind-the-scenes, but your customers will see it your brand at the top and gets you up and running quickly. Or, you can use iFrame or API options, which lets you natively embed Wingspan functionality inside your user experience. We work directly with our partners to find the best option for their customers.

With payments, you can choose whether or not you want the full support of our expert team or if you’d rather take a more DIY approach to adding payment functionality to your product. Either way, partnering with Wingspan gives you access to our team of experts who are here to help you implement the best solution for your product and your customers. We walk you through every step from product design to beta testing. 

Said Zachary McCall, Wingspan’s Partnerships Lead, “We’ve created a super high-quality experience for contractors that’s different from anything else out there, while also offering all of these features that people want to use to unlock payments for their user base. It makes us the most comprehensive contractor tool you can find on the market.”

Bring Wingspan’s end-to-end 1099 payroll experience into your platform while keeping your brand front and center. See how we can work together >

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